Concept

The Living Labs Concept refers to an R&D methodology where innovations, such as services, products or application enhancements, are created and validated in real-world environments. A living lab approach aims at providing usable ICT products and services. The living lab approach addresses this issue by incorporating three different groups of stakeholders/perspectives that are essential for launching successful ICT innovations.

First, there is a need to know who the users are and to identify their needs and preferences. Second, to be able to produce commercial successful innovations, business models needs to be addressed early in the process. Finally, there is a need to incorporate knowledge about technology. In other words, society, market and enabling technologies are essential stakeholders/perspectives needed in a co-design process to enable successful ICT innovations.

Our definition of Living Lab is: A Living Lab is a user-centric innovation milieu built on every-day practice and research, with an approach that facilitates user influence in open and distributed innovation processes engaging all relevant partners in real-life contexts, aiming to create sustainable values (Bergvall-Kåreborn, Ihlström Eriksson, Svensson and Ståhlbröst,2009).

We have also identified five key Living Lab components (Figure 2) and five key Living Lab principles (Figure 3).

Figure 2.
Living Lab Components

Figure 3. Living Lab Principles

News

Halmstad Living Lab has been granted 2.000.000 SEK (together with HCH) for the project "Towards a Health Innovation Alliance - introducing a Living Lab perspective" funded by VINNOVA.